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208 A Mouthful of Sand ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1976, my cousin Suzanne called my office at the university to tell me she was worried about her dad, my Uncle Bert. He had flown to Alaska from his home in Seattle for a sailing adventure with his old friends Don and Cathy Lowcock. On September 4 the three had set out from Seward on the Lowcocks’ sailboat Tiger Lil, bound for Seattle. The Lowcocks would sail on alone to Hawaii. Now they were overdue in Ketchikan, and the Coast Guard had begun an air search. Suzanne was scared and wondered what I thought about it. I told her not to worry. They hadn’t been gone all that long and had probably run into some bad weather, maybe ducked into a little bay somewhere to wait it out. I didn’t mention the Gulf. I learned later that Tiger Lil was a good-sized boat, roughly the dimensions of Ishmael, a thirty-eight-footer with an eleven-foot beam. It was well-equipped for blue water sailing, with radar, loran, a depth-finder, at least one emergency beacon, and three radios—a VHF set, a citizens’ band set, and a Ham radio. Don Lowcock had equipped it with two selfinflating life rafts in addition to an Avon inflatable dinghy, and they carried more than enough life jackets and survival suits to satisfy Coast Guard regulations. He had extensive experience with small boats in Southeastern Alaska and around Kachemak Bay and had taken a class in small-boat sailing before sailing Tiger Lil to Alaska the previous spring. Their Gulf crossing on that trip had been pleasant and uneventful, and Don’s main concern on this trip was that he wanted to reach Seattle in time to catch favorable winds from there to Hawaii. By the time that Suzanne called me, the Coast Guard had begun checking harbors in communities between Prince William Sound and Seattle, and they had received reports from people who believed they’d sighted Tiger Lil near Sitka on September 10, and near Ketchikan on the fifteenth. There were later reports, one from a man in Sitka saying that A Mouthful of Sand 209 he’d heard a Mayday on his citizens band radio at about 3 p.m. on the twenty-first, but he hadn’t caught the vessel’s name or position. And on the twenty-fourth someone near Cordova heard an indistinct “Mayday!” and “Going down!” but again there was no vessel name or position. On the same day the Coast Guard began a shoreline search by helicopter out of Ketchikan, from Sitka north to Yakutat, and another one out of Kodiak from Seward south to Sitka. Early in the afternoon on the twenty-fourth the Coast Guard helicopter out of Kodiak spotted debris on the Gulf side of Montague Island, and by 3:30 had recovered two large battered pieces of fiberglass and a clear plastic skylight hatch, all thought to be from a sailboat. After flying the debris to Seward they determined that one piece with rectangular windows was from a cabin, and measured 12 feet 7 inches by 4 feet 2 inches. One of the windows was crushed inward. The other piece was from a boat deck and measured 7 feet 9 inches by 2 feet 2 inches. Both pieces had ragged edges. By the next day people who knew the boat identified the debris as belonging to Tiger Lil. On September 28, two members of a maintenance and repair team arrived at Kayak Island to inspect the light station at Cape St. Elias and found my uncle’s body washed ashore. Partly covered by sea weed, badly decomposed and showing considerable “animal damage” (as the autopsy reports), he was wearing long underpants, two pair of socks, and only the neck ring of a cotton tee shirt. A short distance away they found a pair of trousers with a wallet that contained his driver’s license. Further along the beach they found a torn and deflated life raft under some logs, but there was no way to identify it as Tiger Lil’s. The Coast Guard picked up the body and flew it to Cordova, where an autopsy showed that my uncle had not drowned but had died of a crushed chest. The Coast Guard suspended its active air search on October 1, and on the tenth a man walking the beach on the Gulf side of Montague Island found a life...

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